The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.
You're obviously conscious of being brash or big-headed but I always knew I was going to be a footballer when I was seven or eight. I didn't just think I wanted to be one, I knew I was going to be one. Nothing ever surprised me really.
I never wrote. I also never really thought about being an actor. But when it was time to go to high school, we couldn't afford private school, so I tried out for all the special schools in New York.
I don't know that I 'look up' to them, but in our predictably partisan media world, I admire journalists who are genuinely nonpartisan and totally fearless in their work - people who have no interest in being invited to the cocktail party. I don't agree with everything he writes, but Glenn Greenwald comes to mind.
I had children very young. You go through a period of immense guilt about being a working mother.
Ideally, I'd like to go right back to getting $7 million a picture and being the headliner. That's probably not going to happen.
I consider my teenage years as being desperately unhappy.
Rich people only like being around rich people.
Being the object of Alfred Hitchcock's obsession was horrific, but while he ruined my career, he could never ruin my life.
When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.
I like being able to walk into an old town and find good local food.
There's just a feeling, when you're just an actor - I have great admiration for people who are just actors. I don't understand it, the idea of waiting to get cast, being at the whim of others. I find it incredibly powerless and frightening, so that's why I've been constantly trying to create my own content.
We must unify Taiwan; we cannot afford to have our society being divided in half.
When I get home after being away for work, my wife always stuffs the fridge with loads of what she calls 'nibbles' - all the great things you can eat straight from the fridge, like chunks of cheese, slices of ham, bowls of hummus.
Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about - the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government - I wasn't left a lot of margin for error. It's kept me driven.
You've read the Torah, right? So you know the Torah defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.
I was trying to break out of the suburbs, and when I did break out, I don't think I took my whole self with me - I think I played a role of being too cool and hip.
I feel like I have a job to do, like I constantly have to reinvent myself. The more I up the ante for myself, the better it is in the long run. I try to interact with my fans as much as possible. It's good that the person I'm being onstage isn't really an act. It's really me.
I'm creating the kind of games that I like right now. I'm not being held back by technology.
When I first heard 'A Christmas Story, the musical,' I thought, Oh, that could be really good. It just felt like it fit. Some films lend themselves well to other formats, some don't, but there are so many fantasy sequences in the film, and Ralphie's such a dreamer as a character, I thought they could really lend themselves to being set pieces.
You want to have the perfect balance of hot and funny on your Instagram, but you never want too much of either... Don't try to add humility to your blatant 'hot' posts through a half-hearted attempt at being funny. You look good; just own it.
I love whimsy. My mother was a word person, a real quipster. She was famous in the 1950s for being a contester in Utah: 25 words or less. My bicycle, our hi-fi... in 1959, she won $15,000 from Remington-Rand for writing about a shaver. She was a farm girl from South Dakota.
There are cognitive processes and limbic reactions associated with basic emotions. And you can change brain chemistry, but you're still not going to change memories and experiences in a human being.
I wrote 'A Mindful Nation' to promote the values of slowing down, taking care of ourselves, being kind, and helping each other. It seems to me that if we embrace these values individually, it will benefit us collectively. And our country will be a little bit better off as a result.
Being in the European Union, we would be building bridges between the 1.5 bn people of Muslim world to the non-Muslim world. They have to see this. If they ignore it, it brings weakness to the E.U.
I moved to L.A. to write and direct. I had no intentions of being in front of the camera.
When you're standing in line at the airport, and your shoes are off, your belt is off, and your personal belongings are being closely scrutinized, and you're standing with your hands in the air, waiting to be patted down, do you feel protected? I don't. I feel like I'm the enemy.
I have an obligation as a writer to tell a story as interestingly as possible, but with integrity and not inserting false drama... I'm looking to be subtle, but being a wordsmith does not interest me - I want to communicate.
Being a cook doesn't necessarily mean you are a competitor.
I would happily help to turn the stone being thrown at me into a boomerang.
I don't think I'll ever be comfortable being considered a sex symbol, especially after you work with someone like George Clooney.
Being a swimsuit model that talks so much on Twitter... everyone thinks that I could definitely pull back. You kind of open yourself up to all the criticism. That's definitely a big downside to this whole world. How can you complain about people critiquing your body when you're literally like, 'Look at my body!'
Actually being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.
The thing that's been inhibiting long-form investigative reporting is fear - fear of being sued, of being unpopular, of being criticized by very powerful groups.
I certainly want to continue to be a role model. But I don't think it's necessarily about being a female in our business. I think it's about... my track record, my results.
The fact that a woman is attached to her professional life should not prevent her from being a mother.
